Moral rights always remain with the author. I agree with Richard Stallman, intellectual property is an ideologically loaded term. It implies that rights to an intellectual creation are the same as owning other assets, and that using another person's without permission is simple `theft'. Intellectual creations are fundamentally different in that not only can they easily be shared, they need to be shared. The GNU licence is one way to do this, although Stevan may be right that it has limited applicability beyond software.
To develop other ways we will need to work with publishers. While Stevan is also right that we should not demonize them, I think he is wrong to suggest that we can ignore them, and that the answer (for the research literature at least) is simply in the hands of authors. His procedure for pre-prints and post-prints may be a practical one, but in my view it would not survive a legal challenge by a publisher who has obtained a standard rights assignment from the author. It is essential that we persuade as many publishers as possible to accept that authors can retain the rights to open-archive their work. One reason why academic authors have been slow to take up open-archiving may be that they think it is an alternative to publishing in the standard peer-reviewed format, rather than complementary to it. The key to complementary development is to use the power academics have over journals, via the many journals owned by societies and associations, as well as our role in the editorial processes, and ultimately in libraries' decisions on subscriptions. While Stevan is right that these are separate issues, they are intertwined threads of the same piece of string. cheers sol ********************************* Sol Picciotto Lancaster University Law School Lonsdale College Lancaster LA1 4YN direct line (44) (0)1524-592464 fax (44) (0)1524-525212 s.piccio...@lancs.ac.uk ********************************* -----Original Message----- From: Stevan Harnad [mailto:har...@ecs.soton.ac.uk] Sent: Monday, July 22, 2002 3:07 PM To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: PostGutenberg Copyrights and Wrongs for Give-Away Research On Mon, 22 Jul 2002, Fytton Rowland wrote: > whether I transfer the IP to someone else or not, in the case of text, I still > retain the moral right to be identified as its author, and for it not to be > changed, etc. Yes, that's my understanding too. Perhaps "moral right" is a more transparent term than "intellectual property." I think we need to hear from Charles Oppenheim on this... (Also, what becomes of the moral right if a text is put in the public domain?) Stevan